Content is King #2: Is SEO Dead?

SEO isn’t dead; it has evolved and now requires descriptive keywords, as well as engaging content to help your online marketing succeed.

Quality content is very important when it comes to today’s marketing online. But it hasn’t replaced search engine optimisation (SEO). What has happened is that SEO doesn’t work without good, quality content. Your website and its content still needs to include rich keywords that your target market uses to search for your services or products, but stuffing your pages with keywords will see your page penalised by Google, which means it will rank low.

What we really should title this blog is: “Keyword Stuffing is Dead, Long Live King Content!”

Search engines i.e. Google, look for content based on the words the online user enters and then returns what it thinks deems most relevant in the search results. These results are still based on programming and algorithms.

So to optimise your website’s, you still need the proper keywords as well as engaging, well-written, well-researched and informative content. But, you can’t just write great and informative content, with a few keywords and hope for the best.

What you need to do is create content that converts your readers into actors, readers that do something, react to your content. Some ways are to make them to sign up for your newsletter or download your free e-book, in exchange for giving you their e-mail address so you can send them newsletters, and possible marketing e-mails. They could share your video from their social media sites, so that you can hopefully reach more people and possibly get more followers. They may even – buy from you.

Here are some ideas to get your customers to act:

• Have you ever though of going back through some of your old posts and see if you can re-link them to newer posts. (This is best to do this with your most popular older posts). Doing this can help your readers of older posts read newer posts, plus Google really loves it when inside links do this.
• Look carefully at your calls to action headlines. Check to see if any links are getting clicked on. Then possibly tweak the calls to action of those pages where the few people act.
• Your page load should be no more than three – four seconds. These days people have exceptionally short attention spans. If you want people to click a link on a page or give you their e-mail, they have to stay on your page. “Long” loading time means people could leave your site.
• Use your old content in new ways. Take your posts and maybe turn them into an e-book, or any case studies. If you have a long post on an interesting topic, think of re-writing it into two or three posts.

SEO isn’t dead. It’s just changed. For the better we think. Google has forced marketers and SEO companies to do what they should have been doing from the start: provide engaging, informative, and trustworthy content.